The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for translation of messages and optimization of shipping goods between trading partners in the trading network. The preferred invention also relates to a system for message management of messages between trading partners in a supply chain and optimization of the transportation or transportation scheduling of goods traded between the trading partners prompted by the messages.
Supply chains involve large numbers of parties, each of whom generally need to communicate with multiple other parties or trading partners. There are often multiple messages required with several trading partners to effect a single transaction. Numerous message exchange standards exist to facilitate these supply chain communications, but only certain standards are supported by the business systems of each party. Mismatches in supported standards may make communications more costly, less efficient, less accurate, or even lead to an inability to conduct business between the parties.
Scheduling shipments in the supply chain to transport goods between sellers and buyers or nearly any trading partner is a complicated process. Several third party carriers may be employed to transport goods from the seller or manufacturer to the buyer, including air carriers, ground carriers, ocean carriers, or various combinations of these carriers. In addition, further variables must be managed including time slots, product quantities, product volumes, special shipping requirements such as refrigeration, fragile item handling, storage, labor outages, and numerous other shipping constraints. These multiple variables and/or constraints in a supply chain often create significant uncertainty and planning complications for supply chain participants. These complications and a plurality of messages may be initiated by a single request from a trading partner requesting goods from another trading partner. A preferred supply chain management system is able to process or translate messages between the multiple trading partners involved in these transactions. The trading partners often provide messages in different formats and the preferred system is able to optimize or provide several optimum possibilities for transporting the requested goods from the manufacturer or distributor to the requesting trading partner, as well as translate the formats or languages preferred by each trading partner.
Supply chain management was traditionally governed exclusively by manual techniques and only recently has been partially automated management systems such that sellers, buyers, manufacturers, carriers and other supply chain participants could potentially connect to a central server to submit capabilities to the central server. The central server may provide solutions to supply chain participants or trading partners for shipping goods through feasibility techniques based on participant constraint inputs. These solutions are often difficult to process due to the large number of variables in even a simple supply chain event and because of the multitude of message formats or languages of the trading partners. Traditional supply chain optimization techniques used in this environment are often limited and time consuming, in that they sequentially check constraints to eliminate unworkable solutions. Even on modern high-speed computer systems, the number and nature of constraints can make determination of available options using traditional algorithms impractical. In addition, communicating the available options and understanding the requests to and from different trading partners is also challenging. A traditionally solved supply chain management event often has so many constraints, involves multiple trading partners and is so complicated that modern high-speed computer systems require numerous hours to provide practical shipping solutions to schedule shipment of materials from a manufacturer trading partner to a consumer trading partner and to communicate these results to the appropriate trading partners.
It would be desirable to design and implement a system and method for managing a supply chain that accurately translates messages, improves the operation of the computer systems and provides prompt solutions to supply chain scheduling with constraints and variables including time, carrier preferences, special goods and similar variables and constraints. The improved system and associated methods preferably, efficiently and accurately transmit messages between trading partners in the trading network without requiring modification to the systems or message exchange formats of the parties.